Clues to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's From How You Use Your Computer

A study published in npj Digital Medicine details how Duke University and Microsoft researchers have mined data on the physical movements of computer users stemming from more than 31 million internet searches over 18 months, using artificial intelligence to associate certain behaviors with Parkinson's disease, reports the Wall Street Journal . Physicians think zeroing in on digital biomarkers could be especially helpful for brain disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. About 700 of the user queries on the Bing search engine sought out Parkinson's symptoms, while the rest were the control cohort. Duke's Murali Doraiswamy says the next stage is to test the digital metric yielded from the Bing study to see if it would correlate with the computer logs of people already diagnosed with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. He notes the Microsoft researchers were able to analyze the data after it was anonymized. Meanwhile, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease followed 110 healthy seniors for up to three years and six months as they performed a weekly online health survey. Twenty-nine developed mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and these subjects took longer to complete the survey. A 2015 study published in Alzheimer's & Dementia tracked the mouse usage of 42 seniors, and determined the 20 with MCI made fewer mouse movements and had longer pauses between movements.